Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

A Compromise on Liability So Mitch McConnell and the senate Republicans want blanket employer liability protection as the price of another round of economic support.  They have this leverage because Democrats kept postponing their agenda until they were the only ones with a list of things they wanted to spend money on. (This illustrates classic bargaining theory to a T.  Bargaining power depends on how much you think you will lose if the agreement is...

Woke Is Reactionary: The Small Business Lending Edition We live in a drastically unequal society.  Everywhere you look you will find injustice, constraint and exploitation.  Being a member of a racial or other minority increases the odds you will end up on the short end, so what should we do about it?  There’s a progressive solution, to change the system so injustice, constraint and exploitation are minimized.  And then there’s the woke solution, to...

(Dan here…NDd’s post points to more than the impact of the US catching up in testing only recently, but also points to beginning answers readers have asked in comments about what the statistics show regarding re-opening and where we might be failing to report. ) Coronavirus dashboard: emphasis on testing I want to focus this edition on testing issues. While the seven day average number of deaths continues to decline: The seven day average number of...

RIP Oliver Williamson Oliver Williamson died yesterday at age 87, I do not know of what. He was famous as the main developer of New Institutional Economics, following the influence of Ronald Coase, which emphasizes the role of transactions costs in the formation and development of economic (and some other) institutions.  He received the Nobel Prize in 2009, along with Elinor Ostrom, but his influence was really quite vast for a man from a working class...

Bad news and good news on coronavirus; plus, implications for Election Day No economic news today as we head into the Memorial Day weekend, but there are a few coronavirus and economic/political developments of note. First, the bad news: the declining trend in new diagnosed cases of coronavirus in the US has stopped in the past week. Instead new cases have leveled off. Here’s a graph from Conor Kelly’s excellent tableau coronavirus dashboard page:...

How Large is the Income Shifting Problem? I took up this invitation from Dan Shaviro: tomorrow morning I’ll be participating in a very interesting international tax policy conference with a number of outstanding participants. It’s on Zoom … I’m actually the second speaker on Panel II (although we’re listed above alphabetically), so I will be speaking from roughly 11:08 to 11:15. I’m planning to discuss the OECD’s Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 initiatives,...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 18 – 22 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Many of the indicators are bouncing off their worst levels, especially those like mortgages that are affected by lower interest rates. On the other hand, employment losses continue to spread out. As usual, clicking over and reading not only should be educational for you, but rewards me a little bit for my efforts....

Initial jobless claims: employment damage continues to spread Now that there is more than one month of data from initial and continuing jobless claims since the coronavirus lockdowns started, we can begin to trace whether the economic impacts of the virus are being contained, or are continuing to spread out into further damage. Nine weeks in, it appears that, insofar as employment is concerned, the damage is continuing to spread. First, let’s look at...

Maybe This Is Not (Technically) A Recession? Here I am using what is the journalistic definition of a “recession,” also used in many nations although not officially in the US, where these things are determined ex post by an NBER committee.  Anyway, that “journalistic” definition is that there be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.  Today in the Washington Post I saw a story on global carbon emissions, which are very closely correlated with...

New coronavirus cases vs. testing in “reopened” States Are new coronavirus infections increasing in States that “reopened” on or about May 1? The jury is still out. The number of infections is up in 4 of the 5 biggest States that have done so, but so are the number of tests. The likelihood that most or all of the increase is an artificial of an increase in testing depends on the date on which you start your comparison. I haven’t been able to find graphs...